Data Migration: Sync GoCardless Customer Data to Business Central

Introduction

For customers already using GoCardless and implementing Bluefort’s GoCardless for Dynamics 365 Business Central – TAPP, a customer synchronization between GoCardless and Business Central is necessary to continue using existing customers through TAPP. This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to perform this data synchronization and explains the criteria used to match GoCardless’ customers with Business Central customers.

Pre-Requisites

• An Export of the Customer List from GoCardless. This can be retrieved from GoCardless’ portal or you can potentially ask GoCardless for assistance with providing you this data.
• Data Cleansing in Business Central – The synchronization process attempts to match Business Central customers with GoCardless customers using data matching criteria as explained further below in this article and therefore it is important that the data in Business Central is clean for more accurate suggestions.

Process Overview

Matching Criteria

The synchronization process attempts to match Business Central customers with GoCardless customers using data matching criteria as per below;

Field (Data)	Matching Criteria Weight %
E-Mail	50
Post Code (Billing Address)	35
Name	15

Synchronizing the Data

Synchronizing customer data from GoCardless to Business Central is done through the use of Configuration Packages in Business Central where the exported GoCardless customer data is transferred to a termplate provided by TAPP and imported in Business Central to be used in a syncronization batch process.

TAPP provides a page, accessible from the search menu, named GCL Customer Sync which is the playground that will be used to carry out the data synchonization process.

Upon installing TAPP, a configuration package with code CUST-SYNC and including one table (BFTGCLCustomerSync) is automatically created.

Follow the steps below to carry out the data synchronization.

1. Navigate to the GCL CUSTOMER SYNC page in Business Central
2. From the menu select Data Import Template. This action will guide you to the Configuration Package that is required to be used to export the required template. As per standard Business Central procedure, export the excel template. The template should include 5 columns as follows.

Column Name	Definition
Line No.	The Synchronization Record Line No. This should be unique and should have increments of 10 or more. If synchronization records already exist, the Line No. should be a continuation from the last Line No.
GCL Customer ID	The GoCardless Customer ID represented by id in GoCardless’ customer export.
GCL Customer Email	The GoCardless Customer Email represented by email in GoCardless’ customer export.
GCL Customer Name	The GoCardless Customer Name represented by the concatenation of given_name and family_name in GoCardless’ customer export.
GCL Customer Post Code	The GoCardless Customer Post Code represented by postal_code in GoCardless’ customer export.

1. Transfer the data from the GoCardless customer list export to the template from the configuration package, following the data mapping explained in the table above.
2. Import the template into Business Central as per standard procedure.
3. Navigate to the GCL Customer Sync page.
4. Run the Suggest Action batch job from the action available in the menu. If this is the first time synchronization, it is suggested that this job be run for all records.
5. Select whether the job should be run now or at a scheduled time according to the job queue setup.
6. The next step is to run the Accept Suggest Actions to accept the actions.
7. The final step is to process all the actions which have been accepted. Run the Process Suggest Actions to process and initiate the matching criteria for the records. The BC GCL customers will be created according to the suggested action previously on the sync record.

Other Notes

If the package is not available, create a new one using bluefort’s table called BFTGCLCustomerSync table in the configuration package lines. You can proceed to follow the steps above.

The template is also downloadable from this article.